Abstract
Streaming multimedia contents over the Internet is becoming more and more popular in recent years, partially due to the extraordinary presentation capability of multimedia data and partially due to the wider and wider deployment of broadband networking services. However, network heterogeneity and competitions among traffic have made the available bandwidth fluctuating for multimedia streaming application. Furthermore, the delivery is not error-free, due to the best effort nature of the current Internet. In order to provide the best possible quality of service(QoS) to the end users and satisfy the necessary requirements for the effective delivery of multimedia streams, an Amendment of MPEG-4 is developed in response to the growing need on a video-coding standard for streaming video over the Internet. It provides fine granularity scalability (FGS), and its combination with temporal scalability addresses a variety of challenging problems in delivering video over the Internet. In this thesis, we develop a mode selection method under network transmission simulation that may find the most suitable scalable coding from four coding schemes: FGS, FGST, FGS-SE and FGST with background composition based on the information that can be easily extracted from the base layer encoder.